


You can hide under my bed / Holy crap on a bagel

by YouCanJive



Series: Time is the Longest Distance (Between Two Places) [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, And she's super bitter about how unfair life is, Cancer, Darcy is a teenager, Gen, Sick Character, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tony is a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 17:09:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19398643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouCanJive/pseuds/YouCanJive
Summary: In which Darcy is a 15-year-old sick kid and Tony is a 34-year-old man with more issues than money.Then they say each other's words.





	You can hide under my bed / Holy crap on a bagel

Darcy was fifteen the first time she met her soulmate.

She had been watching a Saved by the Bell marathon in the small, fuzzy screen of her hospital room, when the door burst open and closed just as quickly, now with a frazzled-looking stranger in a fancy suit resting against the closed door. He looked vaguely familiar, but Darcy couldn’t place his face. In any case, he looked like he needed a hand.

“You can hide under my bed,” she offered, purposefully keeping her voice nonchalant. The stranger turned to stare at her, and his eyes got wider and his expression more stressed out, if that was possible. “Or… well, next to it, I guess. They were just in to check on me, so nobody’ll be in here for another hour. You just need to stay out of view of the little window on the door.”

“Holy crap on a bagel,” the stranger replied, spacing out each word.

Suddenly Darcy understood his reaction to her words – or she thought she did, at least. She blinked owlishly at him. Unless she was really misreading the situation, this was her _soulmate_. “Oh. Hello. I’m Darcy.”

The stranger was still staring at her and Darcy shuffled self-consciously on her bed, trying to sit up straighter. The movement caused the IV line attached to her arm to shift, and Darcy saw the stranger’s – her soulmate’s eyes trace the line up to the solution hanging by her bed, then to the two different monitors she was hooked up to.

“Jesus, kid. What’s wrong with you?”

Darcy tried to disguise her flinch. She was used to that sort of bluntness, but adults usually tried to ask a little more nicely. This guy – her soulmate, her brain kept correcting her – at least looked sheepish when he realized what he had said. And he was clearly having a bad day, if he had felt the need to hide in a stranger’s room in the middle of the pediatric wing of the hospital. Darcy wondered if he had a child in the wing. She’d seen first-hand how hard having a sick child was on parents. Sometimes her mother had to leave after the doctors came in to talk to them. She claimed she had phone calls to make, but her eyes were always red-rimmed when she came back and Darcy was sick, not stupid.

“Just a spot of cancer,” Darcy replied, trying to make light of her situation as per usual. “What’s wrong with you?”

Her soulmate finally pulled away from the door and walked over, sitting in one of the chairs along the wall, close to Darcy’s bed. Normally, Darcy’s mom sat there. But it was a Tuesday afternoon, and the hospital was hours away from home, and even the parents of sick kids had to work – especially the parents of sick kids, really. She’d see them in the weekend. “Nothing. Just… a weird day.” The man let out a deep breath and put his head on his hands, pulling his hair back from his forehead. “I hate hospitals.”

“I know the feeling. What brings you here today, then?” Darcy pressed, trying not to spook him now that he had started talking. She tried to get a good look at his face, to try and see if she recognized any features he may share with one of the other kids in the wing. And also, Darcy could admit to herself, because this was her _soulmate_ and she was curious what he looked like.

“I’m supposed to do some dedication or a meeting or something. I don’t know. They’re… my found- my mom’s foundation made a big donation, so they’re renaming the wing for her,” the man explained, with big pauses and interrupting himself along the way. He sounded sad. That also answered the question of his name and why he looked familiar. Every patient in the pediatric ward knew the wing was being renamed for Maria Stark, and that Tony Stark himself was coming to the ceremony. They had all made signs and written letters thanking the Maria Stark Foundation.

“Wow. That’s fancy.” The man – Tony – made a noise of agreement in the back of his throat, but didn’t say anything else. Darcy played with the edge of her blanket, unsure how to proceed. “So… did you get in an argument with her?”

Tony’s head shot up. With him sitting so close, Darcy could now see that his eyes were a light shade of brown, with little darker flecks. “What?”

“Did you get in a fight with your mom? Is that why you were so upset?” Darcy continued.

Tony sat up, letting his head drop back against the wall. “No. No. My mother is dead,” Tony replied, and his voice was much softer than it had been before.

“Crap. I’m sorry.” And Darcy really did feel bad, because she should probably have known that. She probably did, really, but chemo brain was real, and things like whether the massive donation everyone had been buzzing about had come from Maria Stark herself or only from a foundation named after her had a tendency to slip from her mind these days. “That sucks.”

Tony let out a breath that sounded like a laugh and his lips twisted in what could almost be considered a smile. “Yea, kid. It really does.” He took another deep breath and sat up straight, looking at Darcy head on for the first time. “So, just to confirm, I said your words back there? Because this was not the context in which I thought somebody would tell me to hide under their bed.”

Darcy blushed. Tony was a well-known playboy and she was a teenager who spent whole chunks of her time in the hospital: she had read enough magazines and watched enough daytime television to know what he meant. “Unless ‘holy crap on a bagel’ is a very common expression I just hadn’t heard before… Yea, you said my words. I guess we’re soulmates… Soulmate.”

“Christ. I gotta tell you, kid, when I imagined my soulmate I thought she’d be… well, not twelve.”

“I’m fifteen,” Darcy grumbled. Being in a hospital bed had a way of making you look like a child. Further, being sick had a way of making adults treat you like a child, no matter how much you aged. It drove Darcy crazy. “And I didn’t expect my soulmate to be 50,” she responded petulantly.

Tony winced. “I’m 34, not 50. But I probably deserve that. I just… what am I supposed to do with you?”

Darcy lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug and dropped her eyes to the blankets before her, feigning disinterest when in reality her heart was beating hard enough in her chest it was probably setting of some sort of alarm at the nurses’ station. She knew she wasn’t much of a soulmate. He was an adult, famous, and wealthy. She was a kid, bloated from chemo, and _dying_.

“Look, I’m sorry…” he drifted off. “What was your name again?”

“Darcy. Darcy Lewis,” she responded. Tony chose to ignore the accompanying eyeroll.

“I’m sorry, Darcy. I’m no good with kids. Are your parents around? I should speak with them.”

“No!” Darcy shot up on her bed, and spoke so forcefully she made herself dizzy and nauseous. She grabbed the pail by her bed and threw up the little breakfast she had been able to keep down that morning. Tony was instantly by her side, his face split between disgust and concern, and his hands hovering over her, unsure what to do to help and if he should even touch her. Darcy fought tears of shame and anger as she reclined back on her bed. “You can’t tell my parents. They… my mom is sure I won’t die, because I haven’t met my soulmate yet. It’s what keeps her going. If she knows I met you… It will kill her. She can’t know.”

Tony collapsed back down onto the chair and thought for the first time about what it meant that he was meeting his soulmate in a hospital – one in which, by the look of the books, quilts, photos, and other countless personal touches, his soulmate had been in for a while _._ Darcy watched the change go through his entire body, as he planted his feet more firmly on the floor, his shoulders tensed, and his expression became that frustrating mix of pity and false calm.

“Hey, Darcy, what’s… I mean…”

Darcy rolled her eyes again. She was used to this question, too. “I have stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma. I’ve had it for three years, and it’s unresponsive to most every treatment we’ve tried. So things aren’t looking too great.” If she sounded bitter, it was because she was tired of explaining herself, Darcy told herself, not because she was dying and her soulmate clearly didn’t want her and she just wanted to hug her dad, but her dad was back home, upstate, working to pay for the stupid cancer treatment that was clearly not working. “Don’t worry, you probably won’t have to deal with a fifteen-year-old soulmate for too long.”

Tony flinched again, but he didn’t say anything. Darcy almost preferred it to his having pretended to care and telling her he _wanted_ a sick, fifteen-year-old soulmate. Almost.

“Look, you probably have to go give your talk or something. Why don’t you just… leave me your phone number. I’ll make sure somebody calls you if anything changes.” _I’ll make sure somebody calls you when I die_ , she thought angrily. She’d probably been too harsh, or her implication too clear, because Tony let out a pained _gasp_.

“Darcy, I –”

But Darcy turned on her side and crossed her arms, stubbornly looking in the opposite direction. Tony wrote down his phone number and, with a frustrated groan, walked around the bed to look Darcy in the face and give it to her. “This is my number, and below it the number for my personal assistant. I’ll tell her about you, so she’ll know to pick up and help you out if you ever need it. Ok?” There was still no response from Darcy, who was resolutely looking right over Tony’s shoulder, avoiding his gaze. “Look, Darcy, I’m sorry. But I’m really no good with kids, and I shouldn’t even be in here, and it’s probably best for us both if I just… if I just go right now, ok? I’m sorry I can’t be whatever it is you need right now.”

He waited a few moments, to see if Darcy would respond, but she did not so much as move. With an eyeroll of his own, Tony turned around and walked back out of the room. He skipped the ceremony he’d come for altogether. He’d argued with Miss Potts before going into Darcy’s room, so she’d probably assumed he’d already left anyway. Instead, he asked Happy to drive him around the block a few times before taking him back to the airport, all while he helped himself to the whole bottle of whiskey stocked in the back of the town car.

Back in her room, Darcy cried and cried and cried until she made herself throw up again (not that it was very hard these days). When her mom arrived that weekend and asked what was wrong, she insisted she was just tired. Her mom’s eyes said they knew better, but even sick teens were entitled to some secrets. And neither of them wanted to spend their time together arguing.

Ten months later, Tony’s phone rang in the middle of the morning, waking him up and pulling him from in between the two women who’d found their way to his bed the previous night. When he recognized the area code, he felt his heart stop and dread take over. This was it.

He debated letting it go to voicemail and letting JARVIS handle it, but he remembered Darcy’s look when he had said her words and she had realized who he was to her, and the catch in her voice when she spoke about her mother, putting all her faith in Darcy’s unfulfilled soulmark to see her through a treatment that was arguably worse than the disease itself. And him ruining it all. He steeled himself and picked up.

“This is Tony.”

“Surprise! You’ve been upgraded to a sixteen-year-old, cancer-free soulmate, Soulmate.”


End file.
